World's Longest Book Meme? 41-50

Questions 1-10
Questions 11-20
Questions 21-30
Questions 31-40 

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading.
To me, there is a big difference between reading because you have to and reading for fun.  From 1996-2001, I was in school.  From 1996-2000, I pretty much lived in a practice room or in rehearsal, and had a much more active social life than now.  I probably read during summer vacations, but that's it!  From 2000-2001 I was a newlywed and had moved to Indiana for graduate school, where I brilliantly decided to juggle three jobs while taking four classes at once.  Suffice to say I barely had time to do the readings for my classes!  While I was pursuing a culinary direction, I started to read for fun again, and by the time I went back to get a different graduate degree, it was too much a part of my identity to abandon it for school reading.  Short answer to this question - 5 years.

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.
Oh, life's too short to read a bad book.  I give books 50 pages to draw me in, 100 if someone else has recommended it, and if I'm not into it, I abandon it.  Nancy Pearl says that's okay.  :P  One I can remember intentionally not finishing is Wetlands by Charlotte Roche.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?
Work and sleep.  Ha!  I tend to read while doing other things, so I'll read a chapter and chat with a sister in Skype, read a chapter and put laundry in the dryer... this may be part of the answer to the question I get all of the time as to how I can read so much.

44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?
Julie & Julia.  They made the Julie character much more likable than she actually is, and combining it with My Life in France was a brilliant turn.

45. Most disappointing film adaptation?
Most of them!  I remember being particularly frustrated with The Scarlet Letter.

46. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?
For new books for myself and not gifts, probably $50.  That's what Powells.com requires to qualify for free shipping, after all. 

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?
I'm more likely to read the first chapter than to skim.  See also my entry on speed-dating books.  I sometimes download the Kindle preview of books that I have on hold at the library, or to see if a book is up to the hype, and then will decide whether or not I want to read it.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?
By half-way I've probably already made a decision on it, unless it completely derails. 

49. Do you like to keep your books organized?
I do, but I have strange methods.  Right now I have two shelves upstairs made up of books I've collected fairly recently.  One side is books I've read, grouped by author.  The other side is my to-read shelf.  The top shelf is books for the Around the World challenge I'll be doing in 2012, and the other shelves are just books I've bought at used book stores or Amazon to read, eventually.  Downstairs the books are grouped by category - literature, spirituality, music, travel, software manuals, languages, science fiction/fantasy, and then I have to bookshelves of cookbooks in the kitchen. 

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them?
It just depends.  Right now I'm hooked on paperbackswap.com, so I'm finding books to trade there!